Tigers and a hawk

A new president faces old dilemmas in pursuing peace

ANY election in Sri Lanka is in part a referendum on how to bring a permanent end to the country's civil war, which began in 1983. In that context, the outcome of the presidential poll on November 17th is, at first sight, worrying. The victor, Mahinda Rajapakse, prime minister under the outgoing president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, has a reputation as a hardline defender of the interests of the majority Sinhalese population. He has called for a renegotiation of the ceasefire between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has largely held since February 2002. Fears about his presidency mounted when he appointed Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, another hawk, as prime minister. But a return to full-scale war remains unlikely.

Despite his image, Mr Rajapakse has a record as a pragmatist. Moreover he has no clear mandate for a bellicose line. He won by just 180,786 votes out of nearly 10m cast. In fact, he owes his victory to the Tigers, who enforced an undeclared boycott in areas under their control. They have been fighting for an independent homeland in the north and east of the island for the Tamil minority. Tamils make up about a fifth of the population, and most of them, given the chance, would have voted for Mr Rajapakse's more doveish rival, Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Mr Wickremesinghe called for a rerun of the voting in the north and east of the island. An independent watchdog also concluded that free and fair voting had been impossible because of intimidation in the north, and a lack of access to transport in Tiger-controlled parts of the east. By Sri Lankan standards, however, this was a fairly peaceful election, despite a number of grenade attacks. The election commissioner rejected calls for another round of voting, and Mr Wickremesinghe was forced to accept the result.

He has, however, called it a severe setback for the peace process. During the election campaign, Mr Rajapakse forged an alliance with two parties advocating a much tougher line towards the Tigers: a Buddhist group led by monks, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which mixes Marxism with Sinhalese chauvinism. Neither party, however, initially joined the new government. Analysts now expect an early parliamentary election, in an effort by Mr Rajapakse to lessen his dependence on his extremist allies.

The president himself has criticised the ceasefire, signed, after Norwegian mediation, when Mr Wickremesinghe was prime minister. He has attacked the role played by Norway, as too soft towards the Tigers. But Mr Rajapakse may find there is no alternative to western involvement, if the huge amounts of reconstruction aid on offer to Sri Lanka are not to be jeopardised.

The ceasefire has often appeared on the point of breaking down. A rebellion last year by a faction of the Tigers against the rule of its dictatorial leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was blamed by the Tigers on the Sri Lankan army, and has led to tit-for-tat killing ever since. This year, the two sides have squabbled bitterly over establishing a mechanism for distributing relief funds, donated after last December's devastating tsunami, in Tiger-controlled areas. And in August this year, Sri Lanka's foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, an ethnic Tamil reviled by the Tigers as a traitor, was assassinated.

But the Tigers have said they are not planning to go back to war. Rather, they seem to be hoping that a hardline government in the Sinhalese-dominated south will sway international opinion in their favour. So the status quo—neither peace nor war—is likely to persist. But the longer it does, the less it looks like peace.